Category: Power Supply
Manufacturer: Thermaltake
Product: Toughpower 1200W (W0133)
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $332.86

You could ask around, but I can tell you fairly definitively that nobody who writes reviews about computer hardware enjoys working with cookie-cutter products. Sure, sometimes the unique products that we get in review are a little too… errm… unique, but more often than not, creating reviews of such products is a far more captivating and ultimately more fun experience. Unfortunately, however, there are increasingly less products in certain categories that have anything to offer that differentiates them from the competition. These categories tend to be internal components that are built to strict standards such that innovation is difficult to achieve. In recent months and even years, two such categories that really stick out in my mind are hard drives and power supplies. There have been some technological advancements made in each of these areas recently, but more often than not those advancements are universally adopted by all manufacturers, so the innovation involved goes unnoticed and consequently is integrated into cookie-cutter products.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, and the success of those products tends to reflect their uniqueness. The 150GB Raptor Hard Drive from Western Digital is a product that offers a combination of features not found on any other production device. It is also unanimously considered the absolute fastest consumer-level hard drive available. As is apparent by going to various system integrators and configuring the absolute highest-end computer, Raptor 150’s are used across the board when performance is not to be compromised by price. In the power supply world, however, there are very, very few products that exhibit any kind of feature that can really be considered unique or superior to other features in other products.

While energy conservation discussion has no real place in this article, that is only because we have expressed our distaste for the way the hardware industry is moving in respect to such issues. We urge anyone reading this article to check out page 1 of our Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000 review that was published back in late March.

With their Toughpower series, Thermaltake looks to change that. By bringing together the industry-leading features found in other products from other manufacturers, the Toughpower 1200W power supply looks to be a veritable “super power supply”. Let’s take a look at the features, specifications, and performance of this 1.2kW PSU.